Masters of the Guild eBook

THE JESTERS

Where through the dapple of wood-shadows dreaming
Faun-footsteps pattering run,
Where the swift mountain-brooks silvery-gleaming
Carol through rain and through sun,
Thee do we follow, O Spirit of Gladness,—­
Thee to whom Laughter gave suck.
We are thy people by night or by noontide,—­
We are thy loves, O Puck!

Lips thou hast kissed have no pleasure in sadness,
Bitterness, cant nor disdain.
Hearts to thy piping beat bravely in gladness
Through poverty, exile or pain.
Gold is denied us—­thine image we
fashion
Out of the slag or the muck.
We are thy people in court or by campfire,—­
We are thy slaves, O Puck!

We are the dancers whose morris-bells ringing
Sound the death-knell of our years.
We are the harpers who turn into singing
Our hopes and our foves and our
fears.
Thine is the tribute wrung hard from our anguish
After the death blows are struck.
We are thy bondmen who jest while we languish,—­
We are thy souls, O Puck!

III

THE PUPPET PLAYERS

In a blinding snow-storm that blotted out the roads
and obscured the outlines of the densely forested
mountains, two youths and a small donkey struggled
over a mountain trail. Twice the donkey had to
be pulled bodily out of a drift, and once for an hour
or more the wayfarers were racked by the fear that
they had lost their direction altogether. But
at last, in the edge of the evening, they saw the
lights of the city twinkling like a miniature Milky
Way, and urged on their tired beast in the certainty
of food and shelter at the end of the day.

They were very unlike, these two strangers. He
who seemed the leader was a slender lad, dark and
keen of face, who might from his looks have been either
French or Italian. In reality he was a Milanese,
Giovanni Bergamotto, the only survivor of one of the
families driven out of Milan when Barbarossa took
the city. He had lived nearly half his life in
France and in England, and spoke several languages
nearly or quite as well as his own.

The other was a big-shouldered, sullen-looking fellow
with black eyes and hair and a skin originally brown
and now still darker from his out-of-door life—­a
Pyrenean mountaineer known as Cimarron. It was
doubtful if he himself knew what his name originally
had been; to all who knew him now he was Cimarron,
the mountain sheep,—­strong, sure-footed,
and silent, and not half as stupid as people often
thought.

The two had been in Brittany, in Paris, in Sicily
and in Castile during the past months, and in each
country they had made their way directly to the place
in which the ruler happened to be holding court.
At court they had exhibited the marionette show now
packed away in the donkey’s saddle-bags, once,
twice or thrice as the case might be, until Giovanni
had succeeded in gaining audience with the wife of
the ruler. He carried pedlar’s goods of
very choice varieties, which might well appeal to ladies
of the court in those days of slow transportation and
few shops.